If it was up to me, every week would be Teacher Appreciation Week. However, this week is extra special because we have some amazing updates to Microsoft Teams for Education to share with you!

The #MicrosoftEDU team has been traveling the world visiting classrooms and learning all the incredible ways educators and students are using Teams for Education. We’ve been amazed to see so many classes using Teams to make learning more collaborative and engaging for their students.

Building on the feedback and success our teachers and students have had, we're excited to share 5 big improvements to assignments and grading inside Teams for Education. Let's get into the good stuff!

Share assignments to individual students

Now teachers can post assignments to individuals, small groups, or the full class. Tailor assignments to each individual in your diverse classroom of learning styles and academic abilities.

Schedule to post assignments

Share learning activities with students at the exact time they need it. Now you can schedule to post your assignment in advance.

Provide continuous and personalized feedback

Teachers can now provide iterative, personalized, and actionable feedback while students are working on their assignments. Assignment submissions can now be resubmitted and continuously improved – even after the teacher leaves feedback.

Rich text editing for assignment instructions

We think teachers will love this one. Now you can bold, italicize, highlight, and make bulleted or numbered lists in your assignment instructions. This allows you to create even richer learning activities.

Turn-in celebrations!

And finally, we wanted to create something lovable and fun to celebrate the hard work a student has done when they submit their work for feedback. Look for more delightful updates in the coming months as we work to add additional ways to support student engagement, passion, and voice!

From all of us at the Microsoft Education product team we'd like to thank teachers for the work you do every day to help your students achieve more. We hope these new features can help you save time, personalize learning for students, and maybe even make learning fun along the way.

We will continue to deliver new features and updates and you can stay up to date on the latest by connecting with us on Twitter @MicrosoftEDU and @MicrosoftTeams.

Availability: Schedule to post and rich text editing will begin to roll out to Office 365 Education customers enrolled in our Teams for Education beta program today. These capabilities will move to worldwide availability in the coming weeks.

That’s great! As a primary school teacher at my school we would love to be able to print all assignments easily on one batch...I know you can see all submitted work in SharePoint but you still have to open each child’s folder to print. We would like all assignments in one folder for bulk printing.

I started using the Assignments feature with the last update, even though it was mid-year and my students liked it. The movement is logical and seamless, kids caught on quickly after the initial moaning about something new. This makes it even better. Presented it to Fordham Prep when I was there doing and it was well received by teachers, too--thanks for continuing to update!

@Justin Chando any plans for sub-teams in Teams? At the moment I'm using channels as sub-teams (to manage group work) but it isn't ideal, for example, I can't assign Apps to channels (e.g. Trello and Planner per channel/sub-team not per Team), I can't email a channel, all Team members can view content of all channels etc.

I love all the updates. I am curious to know if there are any plans to help organize Forms in the near future? I would love to be able to put the quizzes I made on Forms into folders and sub folders. Thanks!

To echo the sentiments of others, great work to the MS Teams dev-team. I've been using it this year in the UK with Level 3 vocational and academic students.

I would be keen to understand how the item under 'Provide continuous and personalized feedback' will work, because whilst its handy to allow students to continue to resubmit work, sometimes I want (need) to be able to lock the work as final. I am particularly thinking of the UK vocational qualifications such as BTECs, where students submit work, I assess it and they can have it back for 1 more attempt only. I need to ensure the final versions of the work I assess and feedback on are not subsequently edited.

I really like the ability to assign to specific students, but I would like to be able to group the students and then use this feature to assign to a group of students. This way I wouldn't need to click each student every time. I could also have multiple classes within a Team and not have to make a Team for each section of the same course.

Great work by the Teams unit at Microsoft. Is it possible to give an ETA on rollout of these features. With August 1 around the corner and our faculty working on their fall courses, some are anxious for these features as well as the Rubric grading, but the last updates were back in May and we have not heard updates. Would it be possible to provide information on availability as it has been 8 weeks since the announcement. I would like to get things in line for when our faculty call about this functionality.

Some excellent and very welcome features @Justin Chando. It's great to see effort focussing on specific education requirements.Is there a way to export a rubric once it has been marked e.g. as a PDF or Excel spreadsheet?

Hello, is there a way that the students don't have acces anymore to the word document given after the homework, the assingnement is turned in?

@philb1977 - I believe the current version stops students editing the files they submit after turning it in. For them to change the submission I believe you have to return the work to the student.

What is lacking is copies of each attempt with dates submitted and returned. I'm expected to have an audit trail showing what changes have been made after each submission, and currently must create a second submission file.

Hello, great work from the MS Dev Team on making upgrades to the assignment tab. I have only just started looking at Teams as have been using Class Notebook as a storage/portfolio of evidence and using another VLE for submission of work (Turnitin in via moodle) but am trying to get a one place fits all situation which I believe Teams has the potential to do.

Would there be any possibility of the assignments tab being able to create a comments section in terms of feedback onto work (like a drag and drop situation)? At the minute I have been inserting comments on the work in word but would find it massively more beneficial if there could be a comments bank that you could create per assignment and then drag these onto the work where appropriate. I don't know if this would be at all possible but would be great if it could be explored.